After your mother sells the house, you return home one final time to help her pack up things for the movers. A couple days into boxing all the paraphernalia of decades spent living here, you’re emptying out the drawers of your mother’s desk and come upon a worn ledger. Curious how she managed the finances, you open this old notebook—and quickly find that it kept track of not money but time, with numbers that neatly slot hours and minutes into blue-lined columns. Beside them are descriptions that together read like a concise chronicle of shared moments—dinosaur exhibit, play rehearsal, dental cleaning, oboe lesson, slumber party prep—a long-running list that takes you back to that afternoon you found an old-fashioned stopwatch sitting atop this very desk, its inert hands reading 1 hour and 17 minutes.

“What lasted that long?” you asked.

Standing beside her by the kitchen sink, you held the stopwatch up to your mother, its white dial with bold numerals filling your palm like a little handful of time.

She wiped her wet hands on her apron, then answered, “That was our visit to the park yesterday.”

“It was over an hour?”

“It was! Remember all the things you did? Putting on your jacket and shoes, walking down the street, petting the neighbor’s old pug, playing on the swings and jungle gym and slide, having cheese and crackers at the picnic table. When you add up everything, even a simple visit to the park can take a while.”

“Why do you need know how long all that took?”

“Because it’s important to know how we use our time.”

Now, looking at the calculations in the ledger, you realize this is how she knew how to use her time. It’s why she was up late that night after taking you to the park—the light from her study surprising you when you got up to use the bathroom—and why she accepted all those playdate invitations from Elana’s mom on your behalf and why you went to art camp that summer before the wildlife cruise. In these pages, time spent with you was always paired with a measure of time set aside for her work.

Because “Discoveries take time,” your mother always said. And she was able to make some really good ones, thanks to this ledger.

In your hands now, it seems to have been waiting for you all these years, for you to add to its pages the gains and losses you’ve accrued as a result of the way she handled time. Several spring to mind: a childhood crush on the tween babysitter; a love-hate relationship with art; an adherence to doing chores regularly and thoroughly; a predilection for vapid video games with cartoony graphics. But an accurate accounting would involve delving into more than you could ever know about yourself and your past. And a distaste for inaccuracy is a quality you’ve long shared with your mother.

So you close the ledger and place it in the box next to you, the interior already half full with old letters, passports, journals and crayon drawings on newsprint.

 

Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices For Coping. Soramimi’s recent work appears in Pulp Literature, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, and The Cincinnati Review.